Monday, September 12, 2016

Halting Creativity

In the movie “The Wall,” during
the song “another Brick in the Wall,” the accompanying visuals show a classroom
filled with students, where the students all of a sudden have the same face.During the same song, they are seen on a conveyor belt moving towards a meat grinder.The underlying point, through the dystopian and horrifying representation,
is that the students molded into the same image; following the same mold
without deviation.

As we get older, does this “you must follow the masses”
mentality help or hinder creativity?

As the founder of Amazon, Jeff
Bezos has gone on to create one of the most disruptive technologies.Prior to that he worked on Wall Street.He tells the story of informing his boss at
the time about his intentions of leaving his company and starting his own
business.After taking a two-hour walk
to discuss Jeff’s thoughts on his potential new venture, the boss agrees that
it is a great idea, but someone else should do it (wanting him to stay and
follow the mold).Lucky for us, he left the
job and started the company that has forever changed the way we shop.

I have sat in meetings where a
great idea has come up – “That is not how we do it here,” is sometimes the
response.Or, in a group discussing change
where a measure of creativity is utilized.Everyone agrees, nods their heads, and then through some measure of
subtlety, leave the room as if the conversations never occurred.This can be stifling to ones endeavors, shut
down creative thinking and, potentially, lead to others rolling their eyes and
have the thought bubble appear over their heads stating, “Here he goes again.”

There is this thinking in the
arts as well.In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn
Rand displays a potential impact of a mass entitlement mindset, where
creativity is put down, and if you are creative, the masses should receive the
profits.In George Orwell’s classic, Animal
House, the pigs end up enforcing an attitude of “You will do as we say, not as
we do,” to keep the farm animals to not show any creative thinking.In music, there have been examples, most
notable was a folk singer that had the label of being the voice of a
generation.He played the traditional
folk instrument of the acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied with his
harmonica.But, oh the outrage, the
heckling and the booing when he came out for his now legendary second set at
the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Bob Dylan went “electric.”

As we have seen in the
extremist world, having any independent thoughts can lead to ostracizing, or in
the most extreme, beheading.We need independent
thinking.We need individualism.We need creativity.Without them, we would still adhere to the
often used quote (for which I could find no original source), “If men were
supposed to fly, he would have been born with wings,” and not have air
travel.Without creativity, humans would
never move forward, we would still be sitting in the dark, still be using
columnar paper and travel by horse.